The present invention relates to an apparatus and method for supporting verification of software internationalization.
Internationalization of software has been developing in these years. Internationalization of software means that software usable only in a specific monolingual environment is so adjusted that it can be used in other language environments. For example, it means that software capable of using only English is so improved that it can use languages other than English (for example, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, German, Russian, etc.). In the internationalization of software, the following is done to adapt to other language environments:                Translating messages and menus on a user interface;        Changing data description formats such as time and date, numeric, currency, etc. (i.e., the year-month-day order, symbols used as the decimal point and thousands separator);        Changing comparison and sorting algorithms for character strings; and        Changing fonts and character sets used for display purposes        
The internationalization of software requires testing whether there is a problem in the behavior of software in a new language environment. Such testing is called “globalization testing.” Globalization testing is to verify whether a system to be tested correctly handles the above region- or culture-dependent information.
It is desired that this globalization testing be done by a native of the target region, culture, and language, or a person well-versed therein. However, the actual situation today is that this test is often done centrally in some regions. For example, test on languages across Asia is often done in China. Further, in many cases, software is developed based on a primary language (normally English), so that verification in other languages often involves checking in comparison with the results in the primary language.
Under such circumstances, difficulty in doing the test increases, causing problems of test imperfection due to overlooked data errors. Specifically, the following problems can occur:
(1) A person in charge of testing focuses only on seemingly apparent items, such as whether the display is provided correctly and whether the characters are not garbled, without knowing points to be noted in testing whether region- or culture-dependent data is displayed correctly.
(2) When viewing a correct display in a language familiar with the person, the person overlooks the possibility that the display may not be appropriate in a test target region.
(3) When characters are displayed in a language-dependent format such as the time and date or currency, the person cannot determine whether the characters are placed in a correct format.
(4) The person is not aware that two or more languages co-exist in information displayed using the same type of alphabet such as western languages.
(5) The person cannot find a missing portion in another language even when it is displayed in the primary language.
Conventionally, there have been some proposals for internationalization of software. In Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 2001-188693, a master scorecard, in which data to indicate a main category of internationalization topics to be investigated by the user is listed, is generated to calculate a prescribed statistic to indicate preparations for internationalization of software products regarding the main category of topics listed in this master scorecard. In Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 2008-065794, multiple fonts obtained by associating letter forms, using different association rules, with a group of multiple character codes to be tested and a group of other multiple character codes are prepared for each font, and output information from internationalization software for performing processing with reference to a pseudo-translated test resource file is displayed using one of the multiple fonts so that the character codes to be tested and the other character codes will be identifiable in displaying the output information using each font.
Thus, there are conventional techniques for internationalization of software. However, the technique of Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 2001-188693 is to assess and improve internationalization readiness of software, and not to support verification work as the most important part of the internationalization of software. Further, the technique of Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 2008-065794 is to address attention to the above-mentioned problem (1) in testing internationalization software, and not to cover the above-mentioned problems (2) to (5).
It is an object of the present invention to improve the efficiency and reliability of verification of a character string described in a language-dependent format.